The earliest of spring flowers had begun to sprout through cold earth in eastern Oregon. It was 1999, 52 years since the state’s last gray wolf was killed on a government bounty. Five dollars, paid out to the killer of a wolf near Crater Lake, marked the beginning of a period of presumed eradication.
Then, in March, she arrived. Concluding her westward voyage from Idaho, she swam across the rushing Snake River and crossed into Oregon, a state that had forgotten how to live with her kind. B-45, a two-year-old female gray wolf, made it to John Day before she was darted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services (USFWS).
Having no management plan, Oregon was unprepared for the return of canis lupus, the gray wolf. There was no playbook, no protocol, no funds — after all, there were no wolves. B-45 was promptly shipped back to Idaho in a crate.
It was evident that B-45, monikered “Freedom,” would only be the first of these creatures to wander over into Oregon state lines. Others ambled in, slowly. B-300, slightly older upon her arrival than B-45, ventured near the Eagle Cap Wilderness Area in 2008. She wore a tracking collar that had been placed by biologists when she was captured northeast of Boise, ID, and was the fourth wolf identified in the state since B-45. Of the five that had crossed into Oregon since 1999, four had come from Idaho. Three of them were dead — two from gunshot wounds. B-300 was the first to remain in Oregon.
While the animals were still rather elusive, wolf sightings ceased to be a rarity in the first decade of the new millenium. Their increasing presence demanded a clear plan of action. In 2005, Oregon’s first Wolf Management Plan was adopted by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW). Three years later, the Wenaha Pack became the state’s first confirmed wolf pack. While many wolves had migrated from Idaho — where reintroduction guided by the Nez Perce Tribe had been successful — their establishment in Oregon happened without any direct reintroduction efforts. “Wolves really are amazing animals that survive by their feet, and disperse tens and hundreds and thousands of miles,” says Amaroq Weiss, senior wolf advocate with the Center for Biological Diversity. Weiss has consulted on wolf management plans for Oregon, California, and Washington. “Nobody is picking them up and dropping them into your state like a lot of people claim. They’re very capable of traveling on their own.”
Official wolf reintroduction efforts began in the West in the mid-1990s — in Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho by way of Yellowstone National Park — ushered in by a wave of environmentalism. A slurry of events formed the conditions for a shift in how Americans lived alongside wolves: wolf advocacy by groups like Defenders of Wildlife starting in the ‘60s; President Richard Nixon’s Endangered Species Act of 1973 (ESA) and the statutes that preceded it; the 1974 protection of wolves under the ESA as “endangered” in the 48 contiguous states; and the early wolf recovery plans of the 1980s.
When wolves returned to Oregon, communities who had no personal experience with them needed to determine how to respond to their presence. Different states, all with different priorities and stakeholders to consider, began developing wolf management plans, typically under their state’s department of fish and wildlife or the equivalent. Idaho adopted a wolf management plan in 2002, and both Wyoming and Montana adopted plans in 2003.
These plans highlighted the variance in wolf management tactics, particularly as wolves were continually delisted and relisted under the ESA, transferring the responsibility of wolf management to state governments and stripping federal protections. The Yellowstone states allow the broader hunting of wolves — in Wyoming, for instance, under their classification of wolves as trophy game animals in certain regions — while West Coast states generally prohibit such killing.
As it stands today, gray wolves are not listed on the ESA in Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, the eastern third of Oregon and Washington, and a portion of Utah. “Every four or five years we’ve had kind of some shifting wolf policy,” states Arran Robertson, communications director at the environmental nonprofit Oregon Wild. “The federal government is stepping back on a lot of those [wildlife] responsibilities. … The states are then designated the responsibility to manage all of this wildlife, but not given the resources or expertise to do that.”
Despite the varied methods, these plans were largely motivated by the same burning question: When gray wolves are brought back to their ancestral — albeit greatly changed — lands, how should humans live alongside them?
A wolf can walk up to 30 miles a day, bringing them across state lines and management borders with ease. Gray wolves meandered into West Coast territory once their populations were reestablished in interior states. Oregon wolves, along with incoming populations from other bordering states, dispersed to Washington, which saw their first returned wolf in 2008, and California, which saw theirs in 2011. The wolves, of course, were not aware that they wandered across human-drawn lines, through different regions where they could be killed or corralled, where wolf management plans were well-established or not yet developed. In the past decades, the wolf conversation has often turned to negotiation.
Oregon’s wolf population is divided into two state wolf management zones (WMZs), and again divided with federal protections applied to wolves west of U.S. Route 395. According to the ODFW’s most recent Annual Wolf Conservation and Management Report, 76% of known Oregon wolves — out of a total population of 204 in 2024 — resided in the Eastern WMZ. With rugged terrain, a lower human population, and plentiful prey, eastern Oregon draws more wolves than western Oregon. All 26 documented wolf mortalities of 2024 occurred in the Eastern WMZ and 22 of those deaths were human-caused.
In Oregon, a generation of ranchers raised in a wolf-free state were faced with an unfamiliar threat. Wolves had been in Wallowa County — Oregon’s northeasternmost county — for five years, when a man burst into the office of John Williams, current co-chair for the Oregon Cattlemen’s Association wolf committee and professor emeritus of Oregon State University’s College of Agricultural Sciences. “He came flying into my office, flailing his arms and yelling, ‘Why isn’t anyone doing anything about wolves!’” Williams recalls. The longtime rancher Williams told the man to sit down. “I’ve seen you in my wolf presentations before, you know all that we’re doing about wolves,” Williams reasoned. He remembers the man, impassioned by his loss, explaining, “But now it was my horse that got attacked last night.”
Williams says he has heard that sentiment all too often: “It’s like everybody’s playing the lottery, and they don’t worry that much about it, until all of a sudden, it’s the negative lottery — and all of a sudden it hits you.” Cattle killings, he says, will spread through a valley and trigger “a grieving process,” quickly defining a community’s perception of wolves.
Gray wolves are large creatures, standing two-and-a-half-feet tall, five to six feet long, and weighing between 80-120 pounds. However, their cultural and ecological impact, expanded by years of contentious accounts, outsizes them, casting a shadow interpreted variably throughout communities. When they hunt, wolves target the vulnerable — a habit that’s beneficial to maintaining healthy herds of deer and elk, but troubling to livestock owners. “There are people in rural areas that are uncomfortable with some conservation measures. There are also people in those communities that are very invested in conservation,” says Robertson. While he explains the rural-urban divide does not always hold true when considering perspectives on wolf management, stakeholders — like some cattle ranchers — may develop opinions based on how wolves affect their profession. In this respect, Weiss comments, “The livestock industry has had a stranglehold on the wolf narrative for the last 400 years.”
The extirpation of gray wolves began with the arrival of European settlers, and continued through the period of Manifest Destiny-driven expansion until there were no more wolves in the West. Hunting, poisoning, habitat loss, and government-sponsored eradication swept most wolves out of the American West by the early 1900s. Weiss explains that the apprehension surrounding the animals “goes back to some very deep philosophical feelings about wolves, views that were held by European invaders who came here.” These opinions were new to the region, as Weiss describes: “The indigenous people, who lived in this country for 10 to 20,000 years with the wolf, did not feel this way about the wolf.”
In 1843, residents of Willamette Valley held a series of “wolf meetings” at Champoeg to decide how to address livestock attacks by predators. They established a bounty system, funded by residents, to reward hunters who killed wolves, bears, and cougars. As the foundation for Oregon’s first provincial government was laid, the depiction of wolves as creatures to vanquish was ingrained in its policy.
These views that painted wolves as vicious, predatory, and at odds to settlers’ survival still filter into management practices today. “Very often, what you find is, agencies reach for the gun. They’re looking for a quick, lethal solution,” says Weiss.
Wolves still enrapture communities. In small-town restaurants — the ubiquitous kind Williams describes, with “a big front table, maybe a potbellied stove, or at least a good pot of coffee” — wolves captivate conversations, as far as he observes. “For two [years] in Wallowa County after the wolves got here, there was only one topic for all the ‘coffee clutchers,’ 365 days a year. That was the wolf,” remembers Williams.
Today, managing wolves is critical to mitigating economic and emotional losses, and agencies’ plans must reconcile loud voices of grief with an ecological imperative to protect. When wolf depredations — the killing or injuring of livestock — take out cattle, Williams describes impacted communities as “faded.” A rancher “loses much, much more than just a dead carcass,” he says; cattle become jumpy, less likely to breed, lighter than they should be, and harder to manage. The trauma of one cattle death is felt throughout the herd.
To compensate for this economic toll, Oregon enacted provisions for ranchers to receive compensation when their sheep and cattle were harmed or killed by wolves through a block grant program with Oregon’s Department of Agriculture. In 2024, $789,565 was awarded across 13 counties for dead and missing livestock, wolf-livestock conflict prevention efforts, and administrative fees. Originally, the wording of these payouts was more generalized, compensating ranchers for the market value of an animal, and providing payment for lost animals.
Robertson explains that the lower threshold of proof saw “people getting reimbursed for cows that were lost in areas that did not have wolves. They were getting reimbursed for cows that were killed after the cows were supposed to be moved off of the grazing land, so the cows were illegally grazing, got killed in wolf territory, and then the state wrote them a check for breaking the law.”
These flaws were addressed in the recent Oregon Senate Bill 777. The bill raises the compensation to three to seven times the market value, but only provides that sum for probable and confirmed harm. Only ranchers who have previously implemented deterrent tactics, such as proper fencing and alarm systems, qualify.
Despite the recurring loop that brings the wolf conversation back to the grisly scene of depredated cattle, wolves are responsible for a miniscule proportion of cattle deaths, by most accounts. “Ninety to 95% of livestock losses are due to causes that have nothing to do with any predator,” comments Weiss, referencing statistics from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Agricultural Statistics Service Oregon Field Office. The remaining deaths attributed to predators are split between mountain lions, bears, bobcats, and wolves. By the USDA’s 2015 national count, predators were responsible for 2.4% of cattle deaths; within that, wolves made up 4.9% of cattle deaths. “It’s really perplexing with headlines in the country [that] are screaming at losses due to wolves,” comments Weiss.
Investigations detailed by ODFW in their 2024 annual report confirmed 69 depredations and listed 12 other events as probable depredations. In response to “chronic depredation,” defined as two depredations within a nine month period in the Eastern WMZ, 11 wolves were lethally removed by the state, as permitted by Oregon Administrative Rule 635-110-0030.
“The emphasis on wolves is really a story about the proportional voice of this one [livestock] industry,” says Robertson. He observes the political aspect of the livestock industry as having tunnel vision when it comes to interacting with the environment, centering the safety of their cattle above all else. Cliff Bentz, Oregon’s only Republican member of Congress and Oregon-raised rancher, addressed the U.S. House of Representatives on Dec. 12, 2025, emphasizing the dangers of wolves. Illustrating his speech with images of maimed livestock, he remarked on his belief that the ESA is enforced unfairly, leading to financial burden on ranchers. “There is nothing refined about how a wolf goes about feeding itself,” he said. In his written remarks released the same day, Bentz stated, “If society wants the wolf, society must pay for the wolf,” referencing his effort to alleviate ranchers of undue financial strain caused by the predators. Bentz did not respond to requests for comment.
Ranchers and cattle are not the only relationships that the returned wolves navigate. As apex predators, wolves are of prime importance for keeping ecosystems in balance by effectively regulating elk, deer, and other prey populations — a factor often cited by environmental advocates.
Debates surrounding proper management today are often a tangle of conflicting interests. “All wildlife management, but especially wolf management, is political,” says Robertson. “I don’t know if there has ever been a purely scientific wildlife management plan, because we share a landscape and habitat with a lot of these animals, and so any policy that comes up is political.”
Management plans are informed by biologists and ecological data, but also account for shifting public opinion, community interests, and the concerns of ranchers and hunters. “Fundamentally, they are political documents and political management plans,” says Robertson. “Science is a part of them, but it is not necessarily the thing that drives them.” To him, this dynamic underscores the importance of conservation and advocacy groups in the policymaking process, as individuals who can speak for “the good of the species, the good of all the species that are connected in that web, rather than the single economic interests of one stakeholder group.”
In creating its wolf management plan, Washington saw similar value in seeking out a variety of perspectives. Subhadeep Bhattacharjee, wolf and grizzly bear policy lead for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW), explains that the state’s Wolf Advisory Group was created in 2013 with this express purpose in mind. “We have 18 members that represent four major identity groups … that have some partnership in wolf management,” he states. “One group is livestock producers, the second group is hunters, the third group is environmentalist and conservation organization people, and the fourth group is at-large members.” Bhattacharjee emphasizes that the Wolf Advisory Group is unique compared to other western states, aiming to balance opinions of enforcement alongside their 2011 wolf management plan.
Biologists utilize several methods of tracking to gain a better understanding of the number, identity, and location of wolves in an area. These tactics range from the non-invasive, such as aerial monitoring and trail cameras, to the more invasive radio collaring. “There’s a conundrum here. You don’t want to have to have a collar on a wild animal,” explains Weiss. “The flip side of that is you get all this information.” From fresh tracks to howls picked up on acoustic devices, techniques that reveal more about an area’s wolf population can ultimately lessen human-wolf conflict.
When agencies can communicate with ranchers about hot spots of wolf activity, ranchers can take appropriate measures. “It can be really helpful for the agency to be able to alert ranchers,” explains Weiss, who says that such notification can allow them to “make sure [any animal] who’s vulnerable won’t be vulnerable to a wolf.”
In areas where wolf activity is prevalent, implementing proactive measures to lower the likelihood of wolf-cattle incidents has proven valuable. Bhattacharjee explains that Washington state pays to contract “range riders,” who stay near cattle for the entirety of hunting season. The riders’ presence on horseback can lower wolf-cattle incidents, as it calms cattle and disrupts wolves’ hunting patterns. Ranchers can also employ their own range riders, practicing the once-standard herd supervision method that fell out of style when top predators were eradicated from the West.
Non-lethal preventative measures are not viewed as adequate by all. “We in Oregon are doing passive management,” says Williams. “We’re coming out in the spring and saying, ‘How many wolves has God given us this year to manage?’ And then we’re figuring out how to try and manage those with the minimum conflict.” He views this tactic as not aggressive enough, saying that where he believes the future of wolf management lies is with strictly regulating wolf populations. Packs of fewer than six wolves don’t seem to depredate, he mentions. As for strong-arming wolf packs to a level population? “We think that’s aggressive management. We think that’s appropriate management,” he remarks.
Here too lies an emotional component. “The helplessness of the ranchers … of having a wolf attacking your livestock, there’s nothing you can do about it, right? That’s where it’s 10 times worse than over here,” says Williams. Bentz, in his December testimony, similarly raised the question of emotional tolls on ranching communities, citing “anger” and “intense frustration” resulting from wolves being legally protected.
As protective policies stand, ranchers cannot kill wolves — not out of frustration or anticipation. “Poaching is anytime a wolf is killed illegally,” explains Weiss, “so it doesn’t really matter what the motivation of the person is.” At the end of 2024, seven human-caused wolf mortalities were under investigation by Oregon State Police and, for the incident that occurred in the federally-protected portion of Oregon, USFWS.
“Caught-in-act take” is the only exception to the no-kill rule, by which a livestock producer can legally shoot a wolf if it is biting, wounding, killing, or chasing livestock or working dogs. In 2024, three wolves were lawfully killed under this exception.
The disagreement around how, when, and if wolves should be killed highlights, once again, diverging viewpoints. Williams believes healthy management would “balanc[e] the number of wolves and predators to the number of wildlife where there would be a minimal conflict with humans, minimal conflict with livestock, and that we wouldn’t be killing off our elk and deer herds.” Reducing conflict through lethally controlling the wolf population is not a scientifically-proven approach. In fact, killing a wolf can disrupt pack hunting dynamics and increase the odds of depredation, according to a 2014 study by Washington State University.
“Agencies mistakenly think if they allow people to kill wolves, that will help them blow off steam, they’ll feel more accepting of wolves,” says Weiss. “That’s not what the science says.” Whether wolves are killed through hunting, trapping, or government-sanctioned action, Weiss is concerned that social tolerance for the animals decreases. Regions of increased hostility, particularly as states hold power to revise their management and conservation procedures, pose a risk.
“Wolves don’t read maps,” states Williams, who knows them as roving creatures that can make it hundreds of miles from where they killed a rancher’s cattle in weeks. The adventurous gray wolf is thus swept up in the multitudes of opinions and procedures that can exist across geographic regions: persecuted more strongly in Wyoming than in Washington, protected more strictly in Oregon’s two western thirds than in the eastern remainder.
As wolves continue to be federally delisted in Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho, as well as regions of Oregon and Washington, internal decisions that affect states’ policies are becoming all the more important. In gray wolf conservation efforts, it’s easy to see the optimism that has accompanied decades of restoration and reintroduction efforts, the mantle of keystone species the wolf claims throughout the varying environments of the West. Yet, these aren’t the undeveloped lands wolves once knew. An industry, and a century or so of rural Oregon heritage, is still adapting to the presence of the wolves, a creature once eradicated for its supposed unfavorability to safety and settlement. “Some types of practices involve changing human behavior,” says Weiss, “because how the heck are we going to change the animal behavior of a species that has been around for a couple million years? That’s kind of a fool’s errand.”
